October 31, 2005

Boneheads of the Day: The DNC

OK, we don't have a poll function with typepad, so you will have to commnt to give us your answer.

The question: Choose the biggest Democratic bonehead(s) of the day

A. Howard DeanB. The research staff at the Democratic National CommitteeC. The press staff at the Democratic National CommitteeD. The perennial favorite, all of the above

Earlier I asked if Chris Matthews was spreading disinformation about supposed Alito/mafia charges against Democrats. The answer is yes...and no. DKos diarist Susan S had been on this story since this afternoon, and had even made calls to the DNC to alert them to Matthews' spin throughout the day. Thus, it was strange and exasperating to see Howard Dean appear so befuddled at Mathews' charge when the chairman appeared on Hardball much later in the day. Mathews, who had characterized supposed not-for-attribution talking points as coming from "the Democrats," teed off on Dean about what Matthews alleged was an unfair and distasteful attack on Alito--obviously an Italian-American--for supposedly being ineffective in prosecuting mobsters. Mathews implication was that "the Democrats" had launched an attack based on negative stereotypes about Alito's ethnicity.

Current Position:
U. S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit: Nominated by George H.W.
Bush on February 20, 1990, to a seat vacated by John Joseph Gibbons;
Confirmed by the Senate on April 27, 1990, and received commission on
April 30, 1990.

Previous Positions:
U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, 1987-1990; Deputy
Assistant U.S. Attorney General, Washington, DC, 1985-1987; Assistant
to the U.S. Solicitor General, Department of Justice, Washington, DC,
1981-1985; Assistant U.S. Attorney, District of New Jersey, 1977-1981;
Law clerk, Hon. Leonard I. Garth, Third Circuit Court of Appeals,
1976-1977. [Federal Judicial Center]

Samuel “Scalito” Alito Is on Bush’s Short-List for Supreme Court, And Has Strong Ties to the Bush Administration.
“Another leading ultra-conservative candidate is Judge Samuel Alito of
the Third Circuit, known by some as “Scalito” for his similarity to
Scalia in temperament and ideology. A former federal prosecutor and
U.S. attorney, Alito, 54, has strong ties to the administration,
including to a number of former clerks who have worked for Bush.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Another rumored
short-lister, Judge Samuel Alito of the Third Circuit in Philadelphia,
is considered a quiet and retiring member of one of the
less-influential federal appeals courts. Still, his opinions have
attracted notice, including a 1991 vote to uphold all restrictions to
abortion in a Pennsylvania law, including a requirement that a woman
inform her husband that she is seeking an abortion.” [American Prospect, 1/12/05; Wall Street Journal, 6/23/05]

Alito Embarrassed Government by Failing to Obtain Crucial Mafia Conviction

U.S. Attorney Alito Failed to Obtain Conviction of 20 Mobsters, Saying “You Can’t Win Them All.”
Federal law enforcement agencies sustained a major rebuff in their
anti-mafia campaign with the August 1988 acquittal of all 20 defendants
accused of making up the entire membership of the Lucchese family in
the New Jersey suburbs of New York. The verdict ended what was believed
to be the nation’s longest federal criminal trial and according to the Chicago Tribune,
dealt the government a “stunning defeat.” Samuel Alito, the US Attorney
on the case, said, “Obviously we are disappointed but you realize you
can’t win them all.” Alito also said he had no regrets about the
prosecution but in the future would try to keep cases “as short and
simple as possible.” Alito continued, “I certainly don’t feel
embarrassed and I don’t think we should feel embarrassed.” [Guardian, 8/29/88; Chicago Tribune, 8/27/88; UPI, 8/26/88]

Hardly the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst, that's a fairly straightforward beginning to a talking points memo. No way is that beating on Alito because of his ethnicity. So, for a different reason than the one I invoked earlier, regarding Matthews attempt to paint "the Democrats" as engaging in Italian bashing, I still call bullshit.

But now that the document has surfaced, it raises other issues. Just seeing the supposed document wasn't enough for me to accept that it was being accurately attributed to "the Democrats." But apparently it was from "the Democrats," as AdamB, a commenter on Susan S' diary, discovered by looking over at RedState. It seems that the document was an MS Word document sent as an email attachment. The Redstaters got a copy of the Word document, which allows one to track the changes and sometimes, if the sender is sloppy, figure out the original source of the document. And sure enough, that's what they did, showing that it likely came from the DNC, and even figuring out three (!) DNC staffers in the research department who had modifed the document.

So, back to our question: choose the biggest DNC bonehead of the day. Was it the research staff that allowed a Word document to float around the internet, supposedly as a document not for attribution, without scrubbing their cyber-prints from the document? (Doesn't anyone there know not to send Word documents with identifying info on them?)

Or was it the folks in the press operation? Howard Dean went on Mathews' show without a decent response to an issue Mathews had been harping on all damn day. Dean said he didn't know where the document came from, but then accepted responsibility for it! Maybe Dean was blindsided, which would be inexcusable; Susan S had alerted the DNC about Mathews' rantings, and even if she hadn't called them, someone should have been monitoring Mathews throughout the day to brief Dean on what to expect when he went on air. If Dean wasn't blindsided, his response was equally bad, because he didn't rebut Mathews' claim that the document was a bigoted screed exploiting Alito's ethnicity, which Dean could only do if he had seen the document. And if Mathews wasn't giving up the document, the only way Dean could have pushed back was to acknowledge the memo had come from the DNC; thus, Dean lied about knowing the origins of the docuement, therefore
sacrificing the opportunity to counter-attack Mathews for misrepresenting the memo and implying the DNC was trading on ethnic stereotypes when in fact the document doesn't support such a claim. The press operation either left Dean hanging by not informing him of Matthews' rants, or they failed in crafting an effective response.

The other possible bonehead was Howard Dean himself. If he didn't know the document had come from the DNC, why did he take responsibility? And if he did know it had come from the DNC, why didn't he have a better answer? For instance, why not this:

Chris, I just learned about this memo a little while ago. I looked into it, and in fact it was a research document intended for internal use that an overzealous staffer sent out this morning to MSNBC and maybe some other news outlets. I don't approve of such methods, but I take responsibility for it. But the memo is nothing like what you describe, and it definitely does not draw unnecessary attention to Judge Alito's ethnicity. But folks shouldn't just take my word or yours, they should be able to look at the memo themselves, which is why we've posted the memo on our website at wwwyadayadayada. I urge your viewers to look at the document and judge for themselves what the document says, and I'm certain that many will also be convinced upon reading it that the president's nominee for the Supreme Court is unfit and too extreme to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court.

Had he said something like that, Matthews would have looked stupid for playing keep-away with the damn document. Dean would have been shown to be taking responsibility. It would have gotten more eyes to the DNC website, where they would have seen the talking points we want circulating anyway. It would have put the lie to the claim that "the Democrats" were attacking Alito for any reason other than his record and his suitability for the Supreme Court. And it would have pivoted the discussion around back to what Dean should want to be talking about, that Alito is too damn extreme for the Supreme Court.

So, now that you've had some time to think about it, let's hear your choice for biggest DNC bonehead(s).

UPDATE (November 1, 11:05 AM)

The correct answer for boneheads of the day is:

E. DHinMI and the DNC Research and/or Press Departments

This post is an example of another lesson everyone should learn if you ever do campaigns: never put anything out for public consumption without at least one person not involved in the writing of the document looking it over. Thanks to a comment by billmon, I realized that I someone missed part of the original memo. The beginning of the memo. In fact, the very part of the memo that Matthews ranted about for hours and hours before Dean's appearance.

SAMUEL ALITO:

Judge “Scalito” Has Long History of States Rights,

Anti-Civil Rights, And Anti-Immigrant Rulings

Samuel
Alito is a judge on U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Appointed to
this position by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, Alito is often
referred to as “Judge Scalito” because of his adherence to Supreme
Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s right-wing judicial philosophy. While
serving as a U.S. Attorney, Alito failed to obtain a key conviction,
releasing nearly two dozen mobsters back into society. Based on his
Third Circuit opinions, Alito has established himself as a potential
foe to immigrants, reproductive rights, and civil liberties.

In pointing out my boneheaded omission, Billmon asked:

Doesn't it strike you as a little odd that the memo's very first
substantive point about a judge who's been on the bench for 15 years is
an 18-year-old mob case he prosecuted in his previous job? Or how about
that Willie Hortonish "released back into society" riff? Or the fact
that the document has no attribution on it whatsoever? None of this
strikes you as a little, well, slimy?

I'm not sure. Maybe it was intended to be slimy. Or maybe, as I suggested in the previous post, it's just gross incompetence on the part of the people who put together the document; they are, after all, the same people who put out a Word document that was easily traced back to them. It's the kind of incompetence that's usually easily detected (unless the Bush administration is the trecipient, and it comes on stolen stationary from the Republic of Niger's embassy in Rome.) Most likely, it's again that perennial favorite, all of the above.

So, in this instance, there wasn't an easy way for Dean to pivot around and redirect the conversation back on Alito's awful judicial record. And the reason for that was some bonehead(s) who took what may have been an unfinished document, or one intended only for internal dissemination, didn't convert it into PDF format (as TenThousandThings rightly advises in the comments), and clumsily put it out as a not-for-attribution hit piece against Alito without scrubbing the document of their fingerprints and focusing it on relevant facts that the American public is more likely to care about, such as his judicial record, and not insinuations that he's soft on the mafia because his last name ends with an O.

Comments

Me for agonizing over this all day! No seriously, thanks for the great recap.

We need to call the DNC tomorrow and demand that someone in their office take control of the message. This was inexcusable. Hunter over at Daily Kos is also angry over Tweety's characterization of the memo.

We can and should be angry about how the press reacts to stuff like this, but in a sense it's like getting angry at your dog for eatiing the pot roast you put on the garage floor. You have to prevent screw ups like this, because it's easily exploitable into a "story" or a "controversy." People can argue about whether the press would be as likely to jump on the GOP if the situation were reversed; maybe hey wouldn't, and maybe the deck is stacked against us. But it is what it is, and you can't complain too much about the media environment we operate in if it distracts you from attending to the details and making sound decisions. And in this case, I think people didn't attend to details, and they didn't make sound decisions. Maybe it's unfair, and if so that sucks, but it is what it is.

BTW, Susan, good for you for calling the DNC when you smelled the same fishy odor I did when I heard about this. We were both correct that Mathews was full of it, it's just the circumstances were a little different than what we first speculated on.

According to this, Adler was the research director as of September 2nd. What probably happened was Gehrke left and was replaced by Adler in early September, and there was maybe a few days overlap between announcements.

Sorry to sound so crabby. Thanks to everyone for keeping tabs on this. A mitigating factor for the DNC is that Tweety is a jackass, spinning his own 'realtime history' with that inimitable eastern seaboard 'crackerbarrell' self-importance of his. Hard to predict that sort of thing.

Jeez. Dean has never been good on defense. I have met the bonehead and it is us, if we let this non-story grow. The research that was done had to be done and we are all indebted to the bloggers who figured out whether this was for real. But now that we know the story -- let it die. The only think for anyone to say about it is, "if you think we oppose Alito because he's Italian you have never met the Democratic party. We oppose Alito because he's against women's rights, he's against minority rights, he's against the civil rights of every person - Italians too! - in this country."

The only story here is Alito's record. If we get off that we have only ourselves to blame (or call bonehead as the case may be).

Samuel Alito is a judge on U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Appointed to this position by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, Alito is often referred to as “Judge Scalito” because of his adherence to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s right-wing judicial philosophy. While serving as a U.S. Attorney, Alito failed to obtain a key conviction, releasing nearly two dozen mobsters back into society. Based on his Third Circuit opinions, Alito has established himself as a potential foe to immigrants, reproductive rights, and civil liberties.

Doesn't it strike you as a little odd that the memo's very first substantive point about a judge who's been on the bench for 15 years is an 18-year-old mob case he prosecuted in his previous job? Or how about that Willie Hortonish "released back into society" riff? Or the fact that the document has no attribution on it whatsoever? None of this strikes you as a little, well, slimy?

I personally have nothing against slime if it's well done -- we're in a war here and the Rovians have already made it clear that they don't respect the Geneva Conventions. But if the DNC really wants spread the rumor that Alito is soft on the Mafia, there are hell of lot more intelligent ways of getting the job done.

My vote is for whoever sent it out as a Word document. Not just for not scrubbing it (note to anyone who has to review resumes sent as Word documents--you can learn a lot from loooking at the deletions/changes!--also a warning to people sending such e-resumes--watch out!), but for using the Word doc fomat at all. Standard DNC policy should be PDF format for anything going out to anyone. PDF allows things like password-protection, embedding fonts, etc. Plus PDF is an open format, unlike the proprietary Word (DOC) format.

As for the substantive point about Alito's not being an effective prosecutor (at least in this one major case), that's the point that should have been made. I'd say the major flaw in the memo is that it does not clearly spell out why this failure in Alito's record is being mentioned. Stating that it "embarassed" the government is not enough. It sounds like Alito's comment about in the future cases will be kept "as short and simple as possible" is a response to criticism of his handling of the case. So what was that criticism? If find it bizarre that the DNC memo would not spell that out! As a result, a fraud like CM can read whatever he wants into the memo.

I'll add that this minor brouhaha shows something that I have been thinking about since the aftermath of the election (2004). I'm in no position to rehash all of the problems of that campaign, but to me the single most disturbing aspect of it was our (Democrats') inability to respond effectively to just this sort of thing.

My impression was that the campaign placed far too much faith in the news media to get the *story* out. The problem was that even the objective news media tends to do one or two stories on a hot topic and then move on. Maybe they'll do an editorial as well, but then they'll consider it covered. New information that comes out that might significantly affect public opinion does not see the light of day because it doesn't change the basic conclusions of the original coverage.

Watchdog sites like Media Matters and the one based at Penn (name escapes me now, but Cheney made it famous in the VP debate when he misstated its name) tend to have the same attitude--one they've covered a story, they consider the research complete and are not generally willing to update it unless there is some sensational revelation--as in the news media, an accretion of bits of evidence gets no attention. Blogs are great, but they are fractured into a series of posts. Wikis are somewhat better, but it takes a lot of dedication, time, and effort to maintain a Wiki page and defend it from malicious efforts to revise it.

The DNC, or some Democratic Party organization that currently doesn't exist, needs to function as a news media outlet, but not entirely in the traditional manner. They need to run a news organization of their own, with researchers acting like journalists, where stories are constantly updated/edited to strengthen and expand on the arguments and information in them. I'm not talking about the lame "rapid response" paradigm that was used in the 2004 campaign. Instead, I'm talking about following up on the rapid response with an ongoing response that can absorb and respond to a series of related attacks in a cohesive way, instead of the fractured, "let's hold another conference call with the press," approach which then doesn't get reported on.

And then there's television. How much would it cost to set up a DNC channel on the internet, with podcasts and such? Yes, it would basically be propaganda. But it wouldn't be false--it would be sourced, it would offer journalistic proof. Sort of like 60 minutes stories. Errors would be corrected in the articles and segments themselves (yes, there would have to be a page available that tracked corrections in a given story, but it could also track new information that was added). The DNC as a news source you can trust!

Hang on a second. "Not for attribution" does not mean that the source is supposed to be some huge, national security-type secret. Dan Bartlett and other WH officials give "not for attribution" briefings in front of dozens of reporters every day. Everyone present knows who is making the statement. It's just that the ground rules don't allow for attribution of the comments to a specific individual, because they want it to be the "White House message," not "Dan Bartlett's message."

If the Democrats were denying that they authored the document then I would stand corrected, but I don't believe that's the case.

As for the paragraph that Billmon highlights, it seems to me that it's simply written as a summary of the various points to follow. You know, the way some people learned to write an opening paragraph in 8th grade composition. Whether it was truly a clumsy attempt at a Mafia smear, or whether it was simply designed to highlight Alito's biggest loss as a prosecutor, I have no idea.

What strikes me as funny is that the wingnuts expressing faux outrage over this are the same "South Park Conservatives" who sneer at political correctness except when it suits their ends. Do you think these people care about the "racism" when Italian-American groups are offended by mobster movies?

The modern GOP plays the race card every chance it gets and I don't think it's worth the trouble of trying to avoid it.

Why do I find myself wishing that George Mitchell were still young enough to run for president? I won't watch Chris Matthews anymore, but I am pretty disappointed in the DNC, too. Knowing how important it is to get things right, how could they have gotten it so wrong?